Ready for take-off? Here’s your Content Marketing checklist
Here is a 50 point Second Half Content Marketing Checklist to help you create content like an A-lister. Use these questions to get your content on track.
Source: heidicohen.com
Read MoreContent Marketing
Should you re-publish your content to other blogs, Medium or LinkedIn blog? A data-driven answer
One of the Lean Content best practices we’ve seen several speakers at our meetups recommend is to leverage existing audiences on top of your own to increase the reach and the impact of your content. While your blog may or may not yet have a strong audience, there’s always more people to reach. By placing your content on publishing platforms which offer interesting discovery mechanisms or having blogs that are read in your industry re-publish it, you could in theory multiply your own reach by not doing much more.
Though the idea makes perfect sense, it also comes with questions:
1. Re-publishing on other platforms can be more or less complex: some like LinkedIn publishing platform or Medium are public or in the process of being public; some industry blogs (for example, in our space, Social Media Today or Business 2 Community) recruit contributors based on their own selection criteria.
2. Re-publishing content is creating potentially duplicate content which could hurt SEO and defeat the purpose.
3. Re-publishing content means it’s read on a platform from where we can’t convert our audience: to subscribe to our blog, to sign up for a demo of Scoop.it, etc. As part of our own Content Marketing efforts, conversion is an important metric.
At Scoop.it, we like to put ideas to the test so we did an experiment a few weeks ago to come out with data that would support or reject this.
Read MoreYour employees are your brand
In this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution.
Source: www.youtube.com
“Employees are the brand at IBM” said IBM’s Ethan McCarty. But isn’t it true in a lot of companies?
Are your employees thought leaders then? Or rather, what are you doing to develop – and show – their thought leadership?
As Burgess develops in his talk, there is a clear synergy between developing employees into thought leaders and building the corporate brand.
But how can this be achieved?
As shown in this topic, thought leadership is highly connected to knowledge. Empowering employees to share their knowledge easily and in an engaging and rewarding way therefore becomes critical:
– easily because they don’t have (much) time,
– engaging because they won’t do it if it’s not impacting,
– rewarding because that’s what’s in it for them.
Aggregating, promoting and spreading that knowledge through collaborative content hubs like the ones Scoop.it Enterprise offers that show the collective curation work of your brand’s employees is one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand: by promoting them.
A win-win deal for all.
Read MoreHow Content Curation and Repurposing Extend the Life of Your Content Marketing
Content Repurposing – Updating or changing content into a different form than the original to serve a different audience or the same audience differently.
Source: www.toprankblog.com
When I started to publish content, I felt frustrated that it didn’t have the impact I wanted. I had spent hours, sometimes day on trying to get thoughts, data and examples together and when hitting publish, the post only lasted for a few minutes before being drowned in the social media flow.
Several techniques like the ones Lee Odden mentions here addressing just that and prevents your content from “melting like wet snow as soon as it hits the ground“.
Read MoreSharing is not enough: why you need a content hub for your online presence.
Social media needs to be part of an overall sales and marketing strategy that includes your website, not something that is isolated from everything else you do to promote your business. It isn’t a one hit wonder that will magically drive people to your business.
Source: socialmediatoday.com
Sue Cockburn makes a great point on SocialMediaToday; and one that I’ve often seen underestimated: just like in ancient Rome, all your social media roads should lead to the center of your online presence, aka your website (as a matter of fact, I was highlighting it myself in a talk last week).
As she pointed out, one of the reasons for this is certainly the hype on social media (and its apparent simplicity).
With the Scoop.it team, we’ve been trying to identify the other reasons explaining that by observing many companies – small or large – implementing their content strategy:
– small businesses are often finding it difficult to…
Read MoreImportant Stats You Should Know from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report
Last week, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers presented her Internet Trends report for 2014 at the Code Conference in California. Each year since 2001, KPCB has partnered with some of the best data analysts in the country to create a comprehensive report of rising Internet trends across all industries. This year, the presentation resulted in a 164-slide deck that you can read in its entirety here. Since we’re fans of tl;dr analyses & content curation, though, here are some of the most important points from the first half of the report.
Read MoreBrand Stories vs. Product Stories
Read MoreOne of my core beliefs of effective content marketing is to deliver content people actually want. Publish stories they actually will enjoy – to read and to share.
3 Ways to Generate Leads through Content Curation
While content marketing has been all the rage as a buzzword over the past 2 years, more and more people are rightfully asking the question of its ROI: is it effective? Can I afford content marketing as a small business? How do I even measure content marketing ROI?
Read MoreThe Most Important Reason to Practice Lead Generation
A common theme at Scoop.it is helping people with important things to say be heard through all of the noise that exists online today. Creating an integrated content strategy that includes a healthy mix of creation and curation is the first step to success in this area, but another very important aspect that’s often overlooked is lead generation.
Read MoreHow to Prepare Your Business for Content Marketing
A few weeks ago, content marketing expert Michael Brenner posted on his blog a list of signs that a business is not ready for content marketing. He brings up an interesting point in that many businesses believe they need to launch a content marketing strategy simply because everyone else is doing it, even though they may not be properly equipped to do so.
Read More5 Questions to Ask When Launching a Content Marketing Strategy
Feeling a little dull about your new content marketing efforts? Don’t worry, because despite what you may think, you’re certainly not alone. Getting started with a new content marketing strategy is no small task. It involves figuring out goals, strategies, tactics, deliverables, and other words that sound way scarier than they are.
Read MoreThe benefits of content curation for seo
In a recent survey of 1,550 US professionals on the impact of content curation for their business goals, 65% said content curation helped with regards to SEO. Not only that but data from 65M+ pieces of content curated on the Scoop.it platform show that an average of 40% of traffic comes from Google Search.
Read More3 Tips For Breaking into the Blogosphere
It seems today that everyone wants to start a blog, given that there are more than 150 million blogs on the Internet. Despite the competition, it’s still a great idea. A blog can help you market your business or improve your hobby, but with so much competition, how can you break into the blogosphere with a bang?
Can SMB’s afford the impressive ROI of Content Marketing?
Is content marketing worth it? Can your company achieve a positive ROI by investing in blogging, social media, and marketing automation?
Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:
A great compilation of studies on the ROI of content marketing from Eloqua and Hubspot. There are lots of interesting numbers which show how valuable content marketing can be in the long run: unlike advertising which costs increase with success, content marketing scales up by delivering economies of scale with lower and lower costs per lead or visitor.
Now, the caveat is that these studies focus on sizeable organizations who can afford the following investments: “According to Eloqua’s findings, a mid-sized organization should expect to spend approximately $12,000 a month and a larger-sized company could expect about $33,000 a month.”
This raises the question of the accessibility of content marketing to small and mid-size businesses. To really be the new advertising, Content Marketing needs to become accessible to all – hence the growing interest for leancontent solutions and tools.
See on www.business2community.com
Read More5 lessons we learned experimenting SlideShare as a visual blog
SlideShare is a great platform for visual content and an amazing company: in just a few years, it has become the YouTube of presentations, one of the Top 150 sites in the world with an impressive 3 Billion views per month from 60 million unique visitors. Perhaps like many others, I originally thought of SlideShare as a platform to use only on specific occasions: when I had talked at a conference, when we had produced great slides worth sharing or when we had something specifically visual to communicate. I had had great experience and results but I don’t talk to conferences every day and so I sometimes felt I was missing out. And then, one night of September last year, I heard Jason Miller present at one of our #leancontent events and it became all clear: the team and I realized we could use SlideShare in a very different way – not just as a tool to recycle and share what you already created for other purposes but as a media channel that we would update on a regular basis. In a word, as a visual blog.
We decided to try it: over the next few months, we tried to publish at least every other week to SlideShare, integrating it in our content calendar alongside our blog and our Scoop.it content curations.
These are the first results after 4 months running this experiment.
Read More6 Facts About Content Curation and SEO You May Not Know
If you struggle with providing a steady stream of fresh, relevant content for your website, you’re not alone. Perhaps one of the best ways to overcome this challenge, while also increasing the value you provide to your audience, is through the process of editorialized content curation.
But while we know that this process (when done right) is beneficial in terms of driving traffic, extending reach and providing interesting and valuable content, what does Google think about content curation?
Read More6 ways to measure and improve the ROI of Content Marketing
Content Marketing has been all the rage these past few years. We’ve heard from many speakers and influencers that content marketing is the new advertising and that “brands must become media to earn relevance”. But how do we measure its ROI and know our content isn’t just fueling some vanity metric but is actually helping our business?
Read More4 ways to leverage the Interest Graph through impacting Content Curation
As the volume of content published on the Internet continues to grow, consumers can help shield themselves from the noise that doesn’t matter to them by curating only the content that matters on interest graph platforms
Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:
Content curation and the Interest Graph are two different things but are deeply connected. While some content curators like Maria Popova are great at being eclectic, a lot of value to readers come from being able to discover and read from publishers who address the specific niches they’re interested in.
Chad Politt from Digital Relevance clearly establishes that connexion in this contribution to the Huff Post and I would draw the following conclusions for content strategists and content curators:
Read More5 Lessons From 2 Years of Using Email Newsletters in our Content Strategy
As a platform that helps people, businesses or organizations with their content strategy, it’s always been natural for us to use content ourselves in our communication. For a lot of companies – including Scoop.it – communicating through content means having several distribution channels – including email – and today we’d like to share a few things we’ve learned using email newsletters as a content marketing distribution mechanism.
Read MoreThe decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
Guillaume Decugis‘s insight:
The head of the Google Webspam team has spoken: guest blogging is now on the hook and won’t be an SEO strategy you can rely on in 2014.
Following the demise of massive link building (which now can have adverse effects), this is another strategy once recommended by traditionnal SEO consultants that disappears as part of Google’s strategy to fight spam, cheap SEO tricks and promote great quality content in search results. The more Google Search evolves, the more it relies on new criteria such as social signals to promote quality content.
What this means is there’s no way around this simple truth now: to come up in search results, you need to publish good quality content and add value – either through great original content or carefully curated quality pieces. And in the race to publish great content frequently, it’s likely you will find the latter very useful.
See on www.mattcutts.com
Read MoreThe Like economy: how social gratitude affects content efforts
Studies have shown that our brain reacts positively to our content being “liked” or shared on social media. Social gratitude, and notoriety among a peer group, are really the only reasons individuals post content to social media. If no one likes your post, it even can bring you down, or make you feel like no one cares. This is especially prevalent among the youth, with 52% of the teenage Facebook users of the iGeneration (born in the 1990s) clicking “like” daily or even several times a day. Generation Y were a close second with 45% daily “like” clicks, followed closely by 32% of Gen Xers and 24% of Baby Boomers.
Read More